Responder App v3 Update & Voice Dispatching

This week we will start rolling out our v3 update for our Responder app to the Apple and Google Play app stores. This v3 update is a huge deal for us. Not only is it the 3rd major version of our premier mobile app it’s also our 2nd major revision utilizing Cordova and our fist utilizing the Ionic framework.

Lets have some background. Resgrid is a software as a service system that provides apps and services for first responders (volunteer and career fire department, EMS, search and rescue, public safety, disaster response, etc). We are first responders ourselves and we love writing software and services for first responders. But they demand a lot from their software and services, it has to work and it has to work fast! For us this was one of the biggest draws to using Ionic, having a blazing fast UI framework built on top of Angular which lends itself well to testing totally a win-win.

Additionally being HTML, JavaScript and CSS we have a ton of reuse against all of our platforms, Web, Desktop and Mobile. It’s important our app looks and feels the same across as many form factors as possible. In the world of first responders operations need to become muscle memory, leaving brain power for listening to the dispatch report, mentally sizing up a scene or putting together a crew. This is why as of this release you will see parity between all platforms our responder app is on, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Amazon and Blackberry (via the Amazon App Store).

We will start rolling out the v3 update of this app within the next week. Android will be first then iOS, Windows Phone and Amazon. If you have any questions or issue please contact us, we are always here to help.

Telephone (Voice) Dispatching

In addition to the Responder V3 app update, we recently released telephone based dispatching. If you have personnel that don’t have cell phones, or cell phones that cannot support even text messages Resgrid can call their home phone number and mobile number and relay a short dispatch. With this new feature Resgrid now supports 4 independent mechanisms for communicating to your personnel (Text Messages, Push Notifications, Email and Telephone Calls). No more missing calls because the pager is off or the mobile phone was turned off or on silent. Voice dispatching is included with the Ultimate and Enterprise plans.